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Maria Lassnig was born in Kappel am Krappfeld, Austria on 8 September 1919.[6][7] Her mother gave birth to her out of wedlock and later married a much older man, but their relationship was troubled and Lassnig was raised mostly by her grandmother.[8] She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna during World War II.[9]

Though Lassnig began her career painting abstract works, she always created self-portraits. One of her earliest was Expressive Self-Portrait (1945), which she painted only weeks after fleeing Vienna.[14] In 1948 Lassnig coined the term "body consciousness" to describe her practice.[7] In this style, Lassnig only depicted the parts of her body that she actually felt as she worked.[13] As such, many of her self-portraits depict figures that are missing body parts or use unnatural colours. By the 1960s Lassnig turned away from abstract painting altogether and began to focus more wholly on the human body and psyche.[15] Since that time she created hundreds of self-portraits.[14]

From 1968 to 1980, Lassnig lived in New York City.[16] From 1970 to 1972 she studied animated film at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.[4] During this time she made six short films, including Selfportrait (1971) and Couples (1972).[17] Her most famous film, however, Kantate (also known as The Ballad of Maria Lassnig), was produced in 1992 when she was seventy-three years old.[18] Kantate (1992) depicts a filmic self-portrait of the artist set to songs and music.[18]

In 1980, she returned to become a professor at the Vienna University of Applied Arts, becoming the first female professor of painting in a German-speaking country.[4] She was a chair at the University until 1997.[17] In 1997 she also published a book of her drawings entitled Die Feder ist die Schwester des Pinsels (or The Pen is the Sister of the Paintbrush).[4]